It seems like at least three of us have independently had the idea of doing an 'underground caves/catacombs/tunnels' expansion board.

This is a board which would represent all the underground spaces of arkham - the sewers, the caves, the vaults, etc, etc.

I was going to do a 'Burrowers Beneath' expansion a while ago. A few of the ideas were:

- Locations below ground roughly corresponded to some locations above ground. Below ground, you could visit the Vaults of Miskatonic University, the Crypts under South Church, the Sewers under the River Docks, and a Labyrinth under the Black Cave. The Labyrinth led to a Buried Temple.

- Seismology. Items used to detect earth tremors (i.e. Cthonians). 'Blip' monsters, where you couldn't tell what they were until they attacked you.

- A seperate deck of 'Lost in the Tunnels' encounters, whcih is a bit like LiTaS except you have to keep having the encounters until you get out.

- The possibility of tunnelling into the bank vault and stealing all the money.

Any other ideas? Let's turn this into a group effort, I reckon.

I'll gladly help when able.

My first suggestion is that we have a focused group leader. Someone to keep us on track, and make dipolmatic final calls.

My vote goes to a certain Golden admirer of the Beatles.

Thecorinthian, your as above, so as below approach is sensible, but with regards to something like a bank heist, I'd stay away from it.

The question I suppose I can throw to the front is how oppressively Lovecraftian do we want the underground to feel?

If you've read any amount of Lovecraft one quickly comes to the realization that the surface of the planet is exceedingly small, compared to the endless tunnels and caverns below. I forget the name of the Lovecraft story that involves the lost man in Egypt that finds himself going countless miles down to view a horrific parade and sacrifice to something that goes even further down.

What I so like about that story, and many like it is that the further down one gets the horror grows in an inverse equation. Take a look at the Mountain of Madness, with its hinting of vast underground sea caverns, and one begins to seem very small, and at the mercy of increasingly greater evils.

So, I'd like to include some mechanism to capture depth of evil, for lack of a better word.

One of the important themes is how the Ghouls are actually people that you can deal with once the corpse eating thing get out of the way. So I could see a number of Ghoul related shops that caused Sanity damage to use.

-Frank

I will read the Burrowers Beneath and see if i get some inspiration to get in on this. I made some locations last night just messing around but nothing too certain yet.

I'd like to see a rule where stalkers could move in and out of the sewers chasing investigators. I remember someone saying the old AO need to be beefed up so the underground would be a good place for custom cults too. There could be a/ afew summoning chambers for monsters, increasing doom/terror, and a bunch of other things they wouldn't want people to stumble on.

We should definitely get inspiration from "The Rats in the Walls"... with sub-human creatures who 'de-evolved'. The cats could be helpfull too (well, they do see in the dark, aren't they?).

As for ideas for the encounters, there's plenty of movies and novels with sewers scenes: for example, it's easy to reuse the sewers and rats scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (and to make it a bit nastier, too).

How would the investigators be able to enter this subterrean world? Going through the manholes in the streets, probably (1 point of movement?)

There's also a need for a purpose to the underground world. I mean, why would the investigators want to dwell in the dark? The world above is nasty enough... What could bring the investigators below? Gates opening? that seems weak to me (and it's too much 'it's been done before'-like).

If I play with Dunwich Horror, going to Dunwich is sometimes needed because: 1) Gates may open, 2) the Dunwich Horror may appear... but most of the time (in my gaming experience, that is), I don't have to, and don't want to, go to Dunwich, because it takes time and money (the 1$ train-ticket) and often means a violent death (the encounters being more than often bad), or worse a delayed investigator.

So, my conclusions are:

1) it should easy to enter the subterrean world (but it could be difficult to get out of it...)

2) we need to find something 'tasty' to get the investigators to go underground.

If an investigator ends his turn in the streets, he usually makes no encounter during the Arkham Encounter phase.

There could be some danger to stay in the streets... something like: "if you fail a skill (don't know which) check, you are sucked through the manhole"...

It occurs to me, that this is sounding less and less like a board expansion, and more and more like an entire new game with similar mechanics. Trying to integrate it with the Base Game, when considering the size you're contemplating, sounds absurd. Just based on what was posted on the previous thread and this one, it sounds as if you're all contemplating an underground tunnel network bigger than Arkham itself. At that point, it sounds less like an expansion, and more like a spin-off. A spin off would allow us to ditch the standard board layouts, and do something different. Previous posts have aluded to having unpredictable layout; if we aren't using the AH board system we could actually build a map that is build as you go, a truly terrifying horror experience. You not only don't know what lurks around the next bend, you have no idea where that bend leads.

If we build this, we should then abandon most of the trappings of AH. If the board is random, the Mythos deck serves mostly to generate the next room. Gates could still appear to otherworlds, but that even further complicates things - remove the other worlds from the original design. Encounters come from the different types of tunnel - sewer, crypt, cave, etc...with special encounter decks resulting from areas with cultists or monsters. Items and combat need not change, nor should investigators, but allies should be buffed (I have some ideas on this, but I'll put those in a different thread some time).

Does what I'm saying make sense? I just feel that this particular expansion idea, while good, does not lend itself well to integration with standard Arkham Horror. I don't see why investigators would leave the surface world to go exploring in the dark depths of the underworld, especially as the gates and monsters pour in to Arkham. It would make more sense to me if, instead, the surface was safe (and mostly unimportant), but a threat was emerging deep below. That way, the investigators have only underground threats to deal with, and so the expedition to the Dark Corners of the Earth commences (yes! I managed to work in that reference!). I'm starting to come up with a board design, one that may or may not work with some of what I just said. I'll go ahead and post this, and let that percolate for a while.

Ok, two ideas for why the investigators want to visit the World Below...

- There could be a Dunwich Horror-style supermonster to fight. This is the idea that led me to make my 'Dweller in the Gulf' and 'Worm that Gnaws', if anyone remembers those.

- There could be a cult ceremony going on, and the board could have some built-in trigger to do with cultists moving to particular locations. Exactly what the ritual does could depend on how it starts. I already had the idea that were would be a second 'blank canvas' monster type, called Troglodytes, which represent all the non-specific underground-dwelling humanoids from the Mythos.

- Subsidence. How about this: stable Arkham locations (the useful ones) collapse down into the underground board. The location on the surface is closed, and the only way the investigators can open it up again is to go to the underground board and do... something. Hummmmm, maybe not....

@hadanelith - I agree. The reason I abandoned by own 'underground board' expansion was that once you're willing to design a whole new board, it's almost less effort (and more fun) to design a whole new game, instead of making a derivitive work. Except that if you design a whole new game, there's no Strange Eons to help you do it.

I don't think this 'variable layout' thing is going to work either. And for what it's worth, the board I had in mind for my original 'Burrowers Beneath' expansion was half the size of the Dunwich board, and had only five locations and two street areas on it. And I even abandoned that idea towards the end, and decided it could all just be done in Arkham itself. I am extremely skeptical about the value of adding new boards.

@Lemmingsunday - did you mean that I should be "project leader"? Wow, cheers! But I don't want to have to tell everyone what to do, and I'm not sure I have the time to do provide a lot of input on a whole new fan expansion, especially since my previous one is far from perfect yet...

Bouncing off your idea Corinthian, what do you think of this?

Have 6 underground locations that correspond to above ground stable locations.

General Store

Magic Shop

Church

Curiositie Shop

Ma's Boarding House

Administration

I picked these because they have special abilities that investigators use. So that whenever there is a monster surge, place a Cthonian at one of the underground corresponding places. If this cthonian ever moves and deals damage with it's special ability, then close the corresponding above ground location. It cannot be reopened until the cthonian is defeated.

And while this is going on, have an underground cultist moving around performing rituals at various spots. With up to 6 spots to do them. Make him elusive -5 so he won't be easy to kill. with this as an ability "When Cultist moves, place a ritual token in a location adjacent to his street location if there is not one there. Then, if there are 6 ritual tokens, the AO awakens immediately"

And maybe investigators can go down and collect these tokens to spend them somehow?

So the incentives for going underground are to

*collect the ritual tokens and keep the AO from awakening.

*kill cthonians to reopen the shops above.

Maybe there could be a separate deck of mythos cards for underground only. Player's would draw from that instead of the regular mythos, to keep too much from going on above while they tackle the below.

Stories that would be useful background material for underground encounters (in order from best/most useful to least):

The Nameless City - An abandoned city in Arabia leads to vast underground tunnels. Probably made by chthonians, but Lovecraft never specifies details. Good stuff, but more than a little wordy. The most descriptive of the stories as far as the underground itself goes.

The Rats in the Walls - A castle in England with massive underground vaults leads to a family secret. These two are probably the ones to focus on.

The Festival - The heir of an old cult family pays his respects to the city of Kingsport and travels underground to a lost temple. Shorter than most of the rest, introduces the concept of the byakhee, sort of.

Pickman's Model - If you haven't read this one, read it now. One of Lovecraft's best, and fitting with our theme of caverns, tunnels, and ghouls.

Under the Pyramids - Written in partership (sort of) with Harry Houdini, with many liberties taken towards Egypt's actual history. It takes a while before anything interesting happens underground, but I like it.

In the Vault - A gravedigger is trapped underground for the night with the people he's supposed to be burying. This being a Lovecraft tale, the consequences are predictable.

The Statement of Randolph Carter - A tomb-robbing attempt goes terribly wrong. Longer than most of the rest of these, it features the common theme of science not doing what it's supposed to.

The Tomb - A troubled New England youth has an empathetic connection to an old mausoleum. Fun stuff.

The Beast in the Cave - One of HPL's first stories, this one shows its creaks. Set in Mammoth Cave, it has probably the longest description of black you'll ever read.

The Hound - Young aesthetes/dilettantes turn to tomb robbery and suffer the consequenses of their actions.

The Disinterment - Picture Herbert West from the perspective of one of the reanimated. A long tomb/vault portion of the story.

I'm definitely willing to help with this, even though it would take time away from my current project of AO-specific mythos decks.

1. why go underground? because cultists are raising something from the depths, a huge monster! if the investigators dont stop them the monster will burst into Arkham and hunt down the investigators.

2. Why make board might as well make new game? huh? cause boards are fun!! we can keep it simple, maybe only like five locations and when the iinvestigators go into the tunnels they have their speed reduced and they have to go all the way through no going back! kind of like how innsmouth has the evade checks at locations we could have speed penalties at locations.

3. leader of this idea? well i think who ever is going to strange aeons it up gets choice but any body can do what they want with it. free ideas!

i think a lot of you are over thinking it. good clean elegant rules and fun are all thats needed!

you guys are making it way complicated!! locations under locations? wow!! just make it a regular board. i was thinking maybe you had to have a cult membership and then you could go to the cemetary or cave to get to the underground? but please lets not make it way complicated!!

underground locations:

The black lake

The charnel house

River of corpses

(i dont know, so many ideas!!)

@thecorinthain: sorry have to say i am really against a "science" deck, it sounds not fun to me, we dont need another deck of limited usefulness! plus it just makes more work for us! i am for real wanting to do this and i can see everyone having all these crazy ideas and then just giving up cause its too complicated!

i am always trying to get more use out of the cards we already have, i really want to try to tie in bgotw into this, corruptions for how long you stay in underground.

Here is my initial brainstorm for how part of an underworld expansion might work.

Hopefully, this will be clear and not too wordy. The numbers I’ll be giving for cards are just a guess at the moment.

Start with a stack of 20 blank cards. At the beginning of the game this stack is broken down into five smaller stacks. The first stack of four cards would be A. The next stack of four cards would be B, and so on.

So we have five stacks - A - B - C - D - E

Now there would be say five story cards that could be generic or based around a specific theme or Lovecraftian story. The cards likely would have an order, but perhaps not. One story card would be mixed into each stack of four cards.

So now we have twenty five cards. Stack all twenty five cards together, starting with A at the top then B and so on. I’ll call this stack the Trigger Deck.

During each Mythos Phase one of these cards would be pulled, and if it revealed a story card then those effects if any, would go into effect.

The Trigger Deck serves as a time table and the reason why the investigators might voyage underground.

Now, I’ll discuss the underworld adventure decks.

Now envision five decks (perhaps more or less). Each deck represents a level of depth. Deck 1 is in the sewers, while deck 5 is entering worlds of brain numbing horror.

Each deck has a generic theme/ambience running through it. There would be cards allowing an investigator to go down. Other cards would be random events, such as cave-in, or white eyed stranger. Some cards would be empty corridors. (A free movement. A point of rest.)

Into these decks would be added specific cool underworld locations: ruined temple, necromancer’s lair, ghoul feeding holes, and such… I’ll say there are ten. Out of these ten only five would be used any game. The player’s wouldn’t know which ones. One of these locations would be mixed into each level. (Some of these locations might have stated effects that worsen the deeper they are found.)

Now, as the Trigger Deck has story cards, the level decks also have story cards. These story cards are what the investigators are trying to find and foil. There ought to be five story cards, with two of them being blank.

The three story cards at this moment I think will all be the same. Each card will have three degrees of successes or failures. Again, these successes or failures may have or may not having something to do with at what level they are discovered on. Generally, the lower something is the nastier it ought to be.

(If the cards don’t have room for the text, then the cards might direct the investigators to look at a scenario sheet.)

As of this moment there are 5 decks, and each deck has 7 cards. 5 generic + 1 special location + 1 story card. 35 cards in total.

Some cards will allow investigators to move on providing they have movements points, otherwise will require an investigator to stop.

Investigators are likely to find many clues underground, and in a higher degree the deeper they are.

There are greater rewards for daring the deeper regions.

Brief example of laying out the cards.

Investigator 1 enters the sewers. He draws a card and it reveals and mound or rat bones. Nothing happens.

He lays that card down on the table. This is the first card of the underworld. First card of level one. Any investigator entering the underworld will have to pass this card. He still has movement points and draw another card. Rabid bats, and a stairwell down. He deals with the rabid bats and his turn ends.

This second card is laid down next to the first one going to the right.

Investigator 2 enters the sewers.

He has more movement points then investigator 1.

He moves through the rat bone card. He moves to the rabid bats, and evades. He has enough movement to move one more space. He has the choice of exploring level 1 further. 2 cards out of the seven have been revealed.

He decides to go down to level 2.

He draws a card from deck 2 and places it under the card from which he just came down from. This is the first card for level 2, and again if an other investigator goes down to level 2 this is the first card they'll encounter.

The cards he pulls is a special location - Slavers Camp. He successfully fights the slavers and rescues an Ally. His turn ends.

So, based of off the card numbers I suggested if I had 65 of them then I would have everything for my first underworld story. 20 of them are blank, so 45 cards is all it would take. Not a horrible undertaking.

I could reduce it to just three levels for testing purposes. 35 cards.

Any thoughts are welcome.

Thanks

an underground deck replacing encounters? great idea, we should have all locations special ability be a manditory thing and then you draw from deck. like " Cave of Ghouls" when you enter this location, sac one ally or you lose one stamina and are delayed. Then you draw from deck. Very elegant! But why would you sac an ally and not just take the damage you ask? cause the longer you are down there the worse it gets you need to try to get out of there fast! You gain corruption cards for each turn you are down there and the "superbeast" is going to awaken. That saves us from making 400 encounter cards and brings a new mechanic to ah!

pittplayer said:

You just suggested speed penalties for locations... how would that work exactly? I can immediately see several problems. It's all very well saying we're overthinking it, but we'll get further with overthinking than with under thinking!

This 'Cave of Ghouls' idea, for instance. Don't take this personally, but it's exactly the sort of thing I'd want to avoid putting on the board! It requires a rule which says "Location special abilities are mandatory", so you've changed how Arkham locations work - but only for the new board. You're changing a game rule purely for the sake of adding the type of content which could easily be put on an Arkham Encounter... it's not worth it. If we can possibly fit these ideas within the existing rules frameworks, we should, because it makes the expansion much, much easier to use.

And incidentally, it doesn't save us from designing a lot of new encounter cards. How many cards would have to be in the Underground deck for it to not be repetitive after a few games? Either we'd have to put three encounters on each card, or all the locations on the board would be drawing from the same pool, which would make them all very 'samey'.

I realize I may not get many people on board with this, but there are a couple of "design principles" that I, at least, will probably try to follow for any custom content I work on: it has to be stand-alone (custom content should ideally work with just the base game and with other parts of the same set), and it has to be modular (by which I mean that as many components of the set as possible should be able to be excluded without causing a problem). It's always annoying when cards have "baggage" which requires some other card which you otherwise wouldn't have to use. The "Speak To Your Friend" Corruption is a classic example of this.

Re: the Scientific Items: I know that the game has more than enough decks of cards already, but the advantage of a new item type would be that we can control how available they are, and we don't have to worry about unbalancing existing decks.

And incidentally...I wouldn't worry about me giving up because something is too complicated! The more far-fetched the goal is, the more I'll enjoy trying to make it work. If you say all the encounters have to be in rhyming couplets, let's go for it! Let's design an AO whose final battle involves a game of Monopoly!

@lemmingsunday - I think I just about followed all that, but I'm honestly not sure it's the way to go... it puts too much of a 'structure' on the exploration of the board, and makes it like one big Other World. If we want to make investigators explore some locations before getting to others, then I think there are ways of doing it within the confines of ordinary encounter decks.

While I'm all for making something standalone and backwards comptible and such, I genuinly thing you'd be shooting yourself in the foot by trying to do too much of that for the Underworld. Because frankly, The Underworld is an expansion outworld location. It's on the Kingsport board, and you're going to want to have a lot of tie-ins to it for an expansion that centers around crawling down towards the Underworld. The "have an encounter in an outworld location and then come back" thing should almost invariably send you to the Underworld when you're having encounters under the ground. And that means that yes, the expansion won't be properly playable without Kingsport. And that's fine, because frankly the Rifts don't get enough love and tying the tunnels to the rifts gives a good baseline on what cards can do.

As for the special stuff you find underground, what's wrong with just handing out Exhibit Items? If the Expansion itself comes with a usable pile of Exhibits then the Dark Pharaoh won't be strictly necessary but also would distinctly and specifically help things.

However, I am much more interested in an expansion that throws in enough gates for Wizard's Hill and special gate encounters for Another Time to "undilute" those structural expansion elements than I am in another Expansion that can be played with the base game and won't necessarily hold up if Black Goat and King in Yellow are mixed in.

-Frank

On a more structural suggstion, I think that the basic setup should have multiple plotlines going on. This way you can have varied encounters as you wander through the darkness, keeping the expansion from getting stale. Here would be some of my picks:

• Evil cultists are kidnapping people to drag them down into the depths and sacrifice them to a foul beast in the darkness. This plotline could either be tied in with the Blight cards (the cultists are making doppelgangers of the people they are kidnapping), where as the cultists stole more people more blights came out and as people got rescued the blights went away again. Or it could be tied to the regular Terror track, where Allies who "left town" went to a special pile that they could be rescued out of (additional effects would kick allies out of town of course).
• The Ghouls in the city under the city are divided as to whether they should help the Ancient One or the residents of the city. Events over the course of the game cause various important ghouls to throw their weight in one way or the other, providing clear bonuses or penalties to the Inestigators.
• Rifts are coming in from the Underworld to disturb the dreams of the people above. Throw some Rift Progress Markers in for the undrcity locations and you're golden. You'll want to tie in some other stuff to Kingsport to make it a bit more active, but you'd want to do that anyway. Kingsport is too passive.
• The university archaelogical dig is going deeper, dislodging nameless horrors sporadically that can be dealt with either at the site or by interacting with the artifacts in the dig. My suggestion would be to throw down extra Monsters, but to put in an easy mechanic in the undercity to activate an effective gate closing to make monsters go away.

-Frank

All good ideas - but before we go on, I should say that in your earlier post you seemed to be taking the term 'underworld' too literally. 'The Underworld', on the Kingsport board, refers to the caverns where Gugs live, beneath the Dreamlands. That's what that OW is meant to represent. It's not a generic 'underground place'. You probably couldn't even get to it from the waking world. I think that when Pittplayer and Lemmingsunday were talking about the 'underworld', they just meant all the caverns, tunnels, sewers, crypts etc. which are common in HPL stories. Arkham is meant to have a lot of underground passages and vaults and so on.

Likewise, the word 'ghoul' could refer to the corpse-eaters who live in the Gug graveyards of the Dreamlands Underworld, or it could refer to any of various creatures who show up in Arkham - like in The Rats in the Walls , and Pickman's Model , and The Beast in the Cave and probably half a dozen others.

Regarding other expansions: does the underworld board want to have gates opening on it, or not?

- If we do have gates opening, then it's almost impossible to avoid the 'dilution' problem.

- If we don't have gates opening, we need to come up with some amazing board mechanism that does something interesting without needing gates to determine when/where it happens.

It occurs to me that we could take this opportunity to create a large set of extra Mythos cards whcih have unusual properties, which 'fix' the dilution problems. I'm trying to come up with a Mythos type called a 'Gate storm' which opens a gate at one of several locations, depending on where there's space for a gate. That way, it can open gates in expansion towns if applicable , but otherwise it'll just open gates in Arkham. But it's not going to be easy to fit it on a Mythos card and still have space for another event/headline on each card.

Arkham has always used the Ghouls from outer planes and the ghouls from the graveyard interchangeably. As for the Underworld, it seems to be interchangably the depths beneath Arkham and the depths beneath the Dreamlands. Remember, there are two tokens for it. One is Hexagon, and the other is Star. Frankly, none of the gates have any effect on Gugs. One of the gates gets rid of Ghouls, the other gets rid of fire and star vampires.

This split is maintained in the cards themselves. You can meet up with Nodens and Eihort. Eihort lives in tunnels under the real world, so that's consistent with it being accessible through tunnels. But the key point is that the Vampires and Ghouls are explicitly hanging out there.

So I would definitely keep that. When you go into the tunnels, it's all about the vampires and the ghouls. Now from the standpoint of making people go there without having open gates (which I think is important), I would do the following:

• Rescuing People. Each time the Blights come in, Investigators have the chance to crawl into the pit to rescue them. Since Blights are really bad, springing prisoners is its own reward. But by itself that's a painful unfunded mandate, so you should get something for succeeding in springing prisoners.
• Canvassing Ghouls. As the Ghouls defecting to the dark side provides a penalty and ghouls supporting the Investigators provides a bonus, each vascilating Ghoul provides a good distraction.
• Bubbling up monsters from the pit. The key is that the extra monsters spawned from the pit will eventually move into Arkham and count against the monster limit in town. If they come and move in waves, going down and using the banishment circle in the pit or fighting the monsters in the hole can prevent a cascade of Terror level rises. Especially if Terror rises cause people to get kdnapped, that could be a death spiral that would demand Investigator attention.
• Possibly Rifts. The Rift mechanic is extremely brilliant, because it demands an equal amount of attention no matter how diluted the game gets, because it triggers off of regular movement icons that appear on mythos cards in every set.

-Frank

1. the underground board has to be fun to play. my fav board is innsmouth cause it is just evil and i think this board should be evil too.

2. thecorinthian i agree with your design principles just trying to make things a tad easier but if you want to develop all new encounter cards i will do what i can to help.

3. i really like the idea of a "superbeast" being awoken in the underground and the investigators have to go on to stop it from rising. that would be the reason to go in. gates? ummm, we could have a location that spawns monsters, but with a gate someone could go in and then just jump in a gate to get out, and i think it should be hard to get out.